Playing With / Kicked Upstairs

Basic Trope: A troublesome employee is given a promotion to limit their potential to do damage.

• Straight:
  • Bob the Cowboy Cop is considered to be a loose cannon in the field, so he is involuntarily "promoted" to a desk job to keep him from going outside the police station and causing trouble.
  • Stephen the middle-manager has attracted several complaints about sexual harassment and other kinds of inappropriate behavior in the workplace, so the upper-management "promotes" him to assistant upper-manager, which "coincidentally" is also a position where his daily interaction with other staff members is severely limited.
• Exaggerated: Bob is made police chief because he is much better at tactics than physical combat, but he hates his job.
• Downplayed: Bob is happy with his desk job, but he misses the action on the field at times.
• Justified:
  • The local Police Union has so much influence that straight up firing Bob will be a bureaucratic nightmare and will likely result in a long court case, so it is easier to get him out of the way through a promotion.
    • Alternatively, by placing Bob in a position he dislikes, the Police Chief hopes Bob will eventually quit by himself in frustration or request a transfer, which will effectively make him someone else's problem.
  • The upper-management have more than enough cause to fire Stephen... If it weren't for the fact that he is the nephew of the company's head executive, so they have to find some other way to limit the damage he can do.
    • Alternatively, Stephen knows way too much about some extremely illegal activities going on in the company and would almost certainly leak info to regulatory authorities if he were to ever be majorly disciplined or fired, and the company knows that the cost of buying his silence is way more affordable than the cost of getting eviscerated by the authorities.
• Inverted:
  • Bob is demoted to traffic duty as a punishment.
  • Bob is promoted, and is very happy about it.
• Subverted: Bob's coworkers assume this is what happened to Bob, but it turns out he secretly wanted a less dangerous job and only claimed he was forced into it.
• Double Subverted: But then he ends up missing his old job anyway.
• Parodied: The CEO of a major company complains he really just wanted to be janitor.
• Zig-Zagged: Bob's opinion on his promotion vacillates frequently.
• Averted:
  • Bob is fired or Reassigned to Antarctica rather than given an involuntary promotion.
  • Bob enjoys, or is neutral about his promotion.
• Enforced: Bob's actor is leaving the show, but the producers want to keep him open for guest appearances, so promoting Bob makes more sense than having him killed or fired.
• Lampshaded: "Here I thought promotions were a reward!"
• Invoked: Bob has been investigating an event that points to strong evidence that the mayor is crooked, so the mayor goes to some lengths to take him off the case.
• Exploited: Bob, the Professional Slacker, was promoted to a job just below the top ... and now he reports to Alice, a strict taskmaster who decides to teach him to be responsible by delegating all her most onerous duties to him.
• Defied: Bob quits when he hears that he might be kicked upstairs.
• Discussed: ???
• Conversed: ???
• Implied: Bob is a desk worker who misses his days in the field. Eventually, someone asks him why he has a desk job. He says, "It was over my head."
• Deconstructed:
  • Bob is very ineffective at his involuntary job thanks to his resentment, causing him to be more of a problem in his promoted job than his old one.
  • Bob is promoted to a seemingly useless position but quickly understands that it's not as useless as it appears and slowly consolidates power behind closed doors to become the person really running the company behind the scenes.
  • It turns out that dealing with an idiot by putting him in charge is every bit the counterproductive bit of Insane Troll Logic it sounds like, since if the grunts could operate without a leader, that leadership position would not exist in the first place.
• Reconstructed:
  • Bob was involuntarily promoted to a position with a fancier title but no more authority, so his resentment scarcely matters.
  • Ben finds out that Bob is using his new position to accumulate unaccountable power and reacts with countering measures to check him.
  • Once Bob learns the ropes of the new job, he smartens up and does it well, earning the respect of the rank and file and professionals alike.
• Played for Laughs: Bob gets Drunk with Power and acts like an archetypal Pointy-Haired Boss.
• Played for Drama: Angered that Stephen got away with harassing her and/or that he got the promotion she wanted, Alice murders Stephen.

---

Back to Kicked Upstairs.

---